SOURCE: Engel, Bernard F. “Sherwood Anderson's Chants of the Mississippi Valley.” Midamerica 25 (1998): 50-60.

[In the following essay, Engel examines Anderson's themes in Mid-American Chants.]

Sherwood Anderson once wrote that “the best way to kill the growth of a distinctive middle western literature is to talk about it” (“Chicago Culture”). But Anderson got it partially wrong. His prose survives the endless talk about it; the verse almost no one talks about has nearly disappeared. Aware of this, he defiantly continued to write poetry. In the representative collection MidAmerican Chants (1918), the speaker in his poem “Song of the Singer” declares that he will “dare to sing” no matter what, that he will not be crushed by “the machine.”¹ Anderson's readers know that for him the machine stood for industrial civilization, the social pattern that he believed had often broken his fellow Americans. The singer, gifted with spiritual vision, will trust confidently to “the terrible strength of indomitable song.”

As with most of us, however, Anderson's ambitions exceeded his grasp. His “song” is too abstract, too removed from the particulars of experience that poetry, the art of the concrete, demands. Here and elsewhere, Chants gives a rhetoric of generalized loss, of baffled incomprehension too easily accepting the romantic-sentimental notion that the speaker is a specially victimized self in a heartless world. This “hunger” for an “understanding” he cannot attain places Anderson with his contemporaries Thomas Wolfe and Ross Lockridge, Jr. as a member of that well-populated sect which, despairing of an accurate statement of the ethereal, turns to puzzled complaint, inquiry, and protest in the hope that in their threshing about they may stumble onto discoveries as yet unmapped. In “The Cornfields,” Anderson rightly speaks of his visionary persona as one “dizzy with words.”

But though the abstraction and often windy rhetoric in Chants limit its impact, the verse does present a useful interpretation of Anderson's principles. The major argument in the poems is that there is in America, in the very land itself, a seldom recognized afflatus that could inspire in people a religio-aesthetic understanding of themselves and of their fellows. This spirit is symbolized especially by the corn, the crop that in its sturdy naturalness seemed to Sidney Lanier to represent “the poet-soul sublime” (“Corn”²), and that in its fecundity, its ability to feed much of the world, awed Anderson's Midwestern predecessor Frank Norris, the author of that set of novels which has been termed a “serial about cereal.”

The corn, however, could not make up for America's aesthetic deficiencies. Anderson sided with Henry James and others who felt that America does not yet have the material for first-rate literature. According to the prose “Foreword” to Chants, good verse expresses an unworldly beauty that arises only after a society has lasted for many generations. The people of Middle America, Anderson says, “hunger for song,” but they have too few “memory haunted places”: they have, indeed, only “the grinding roar of machines.” The consequence is that “We do not sing but mutter in the darkness.” Anderson therefore means to awaken his countrymen. He would urge them to look not to the machine-dominated city but to the land that he saw as the only valid source of inspiration.

The tragedy of the speaker's life is presented in “Song of Stephen the Westerner.” Stephen says that he came out of the land, the corn-rows where he had lain for ages (Midwestern cornfields were not ages old; but Anderson was seeking to heighten his effect, not to give a history lesson). Stephen heard mankind's noises, especially the sound of his fathers killing each other (the Civil War?). Thoroughly awakened, Stephen says, he then went to the city, where though he shouted his alarm men did not see him because he was no larger than a mote of dust. In a passage reminiscent of the nostalgia that was a favorite emotion of 19th-century poets, he recalls pleasant evenings on the farm when “the old things were sweet”—the simple food, the women who, though they had forgotten “old singers,” still knew glimmerings of the divine that more traditional societies were aware of. Desperate always, Stephen declares that he has killed his beloved “on the threshing floor”—meaning, it seems, that he has severed his agrarian roots. Now he will build in the city a “new house” and will sing a new song: he has no time to “bury my beloved,” to mourn the passing of rural ways. His condition is comparable to that of Matthew Arnold's speaker in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”: he is aware that one world is dead, the other is almost, as Arnold put it, “powerless to be born”—almost, because Anderson's speaker declares that, though standing “raw and new by the coal-heaps,” he will build and sing. The seeming optimism of this ending does not outweigh the near hysteria of most of the poem. Stephen is attempting to find a role in a world wherein he senses that he is an alien.

Declarations that he will sing beside the coal lack the depth of feeling that appears in poems portraying the role of the bard in the agrarian economy. “Song of the Middle World” describes the mission Anderson's man would prefer. Sounding, I am afraid, more like Bing Crosby than Walt Whitman, he declares that he would be a singer of assurances, “crooning to the moon” while his listeners feel the “grace of old gods” in their hearts. He would have his songs “sweep forth” from the mines of the Alleghanies to the farms of Nebraska, the territory he calls “Great cradle-land of giants where my cornfields lie.” Letting the factories close, he would turn to the “Promise of corn,” the crop whose rows form aisles running into the dawn and on to the throne of gods.

The role of the sexual, of overwhelming importance in the prose stories of Winesburg, Ohio, is less emphasized in the poems. In “The Stranger,” the love of a woman is said to have made the cornlands the possession of the speaker. In “Song of the Love of Women,” the speaker addresses women as his sisters, talks of unsatisfying love-making “In the doorway of the warehouse,” and urges women to join him in, one may take it, the cornfields where the spark of the divine could unite him with them. In “Salvo,” the speaker finds in lovemaking a Wordsworthian moment of revelation that enables him to see himself as a “Thin rift in time.” In such a moment, he recalls, the love of a woman made time halt, thereby creating him. The reader may take this to mean that the “rift” delayed his move toward death and made him a fulfilled being. But the interlude was brief: the speaker has taken up his old burdens, and will pass them on to the next generation. Love did not solve his problems. It did, however, temporarily ease them and thereby, the reader may deduce, provided a glimpse of what a fulfilling life could offer.

One who believes that a divinity or, at least, a spirit, exists in the land is likely to develop a ritual for attaining contact with it. “The Cornfields,” the first poem in Anderson's book, tells of a rite to be carried out in the Midwestern fields. Declaring that he is “pregnant with song,” the speaker at first expects to conceal himself; he will hide his songs in holes in the street. He believes that in the urban world the would-be bard who does not want to risk condemnation as a subversive must act in secrecy. But in the second stanza, he changes his stance. He awoke one night, he says, to find that he had been freed from his bonds, the chains that have caused everyone to forget the fields, the corn, the west wind and have made them unable to “find the word in the confusion of words”—Anderson's own recognition that in verse he does not, cannot, seek le mot juste.

Seizing his opportunity, the speaker tells how he found a “sacred vessel” and ran to place it in the fields. In his desperation he debased himself, eating the excretions of his people's bodies and then dying into the ground. But he reappeared in the corn, where he was touched by the wind and awoke to “beautiful old things.” The sacred vessel, filled with corn oil, now waits in the fields. The speaker will cause his people to renew the worship of gods; he will set up a king before them, a king who is apparently to be himself, since he announces that the people may eat the flesh of his body. His new knowledge has made him strong, determined to bring love to his fellow humans. He is careful to say that the sacred vessel “was put into my hands”—he is not himself a god, but is one to whom a god has given an assignment. The speaker therefore has acquired a divine impetus. The singer of songs has been transmuted into a priest who must awaken his community to its needs and chart its path to fulfillment.

The speaker in “The Cornfields” is not giving a specifically Christian message. James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890) had shown Anderson's generation that communion rituals appear in many cultures. Sometimes, however, Anderson does use Christian imagery. In the poem “Spring Song,” this imagery is combined with suggestions of sexual fulfillment as the speaker sees men worshipping at a shrine in the seasonally dead forest. The spirit of God hovers above; the speaker tells his countrymen to press their lips to his, to see him as “Christ, come to life.” This act brings spring. God continues to hover as the farmers plant the corn. The speaker declares that he will press men's bodies down on the new-plowed ground and will “have my sacred way with you.” The planting and growth of the corn have become a ritual of communion in which the connection between divinity and mankind is achieved not by eating or drinking from sacred vessels, but by an act of sexual love. The result will be an understanding, a recognition of the existence of divinity within the land that the people work.

City dwellers who find themselves impelled to the bardic will run to the fields because in their urban homes there is no possibility that they could express the spiritual. Anderson's poem “Chicago” is free of the brag asserted in Sandburg's famous poem on the city, and it does not attempt to reconcile brute reality with suggestions of traditional beauty in the manner of Benjamin Franklin Taylor (1819-1887), the city's first well-known poet, who in his “Chicago” linked lovers and roses with the mechanical. Anderson's persona is both an old man and a child. He wants leisure, but there is none; he declares that love will save him but finds that his lover does not appear. The “word” he needs will not come to him in “the confusion of words” that is city life.

Yet there are grounds, faint but discoverable, for a measure of optimism even if one does not accept religious suggestions. The speaker in “Song of Industrial America” feels himself to be one of the “broken things” that all of us in the West (meaning Chicago) have become. Twice in the sixth stanza, however, the speaker says that this situation is “part of the scheme.” He does not explain; one takes it that Anderson believes people's lives are governed by a design, whether they recognize this power or not. There is, the speaker says, a beginning underway: “faint little voices do lift up.” Reasons for a spare optimism include the intoxication of American place names and the memory of old men the speaker knew in his village boyhood. These people were a generation of wagon makers and pioneers, most of whom, one gathers, were not especially admirable but whose ranks nevertheless produced Lincoln and Whitman. This old generation was succeeded by “Chicago triumphant,” by the age of ugly factories, of elderly millionaires whose developments crushed others (Anderson, no radical, observes that this destruction was not intended by the rich; presumably he thought it was also part of the “scheme”). The speaker shouts out his songs despite the roar of industry. He avers that God reached down to touch him, but then he backtracks to declare that notion a lie and rephrases his statement to say that the face of God looked down at him—that is, he was not singled out as a bard but at least he was made aware, as his fellows were not, of God's watch over mankind. He urges others to have the confidence to lift their voices in song. Somehow, the speaker believes, the rise of Chicago and industry is part of a divine plan people do not yet understand but that they may take heart in.

Religious belief and a generalized optimism provide one way of withstanding the pressure of mechanized life, of holding to the expectation that one day human existence will be better. Another pathway to improvement, hinted at and sometimes openly suggested, would be what Anderson terms “revolt.” His stance is not at all programmatic; he does not advocate specific changes, whether reform movements or Socialist or Communist revolutions. In “Industrialism,” rebellion is represented by a woman, “My mistress/Terrible.” This mistress has thin hands—as the women in Anderson's poems often have—yet they were strong enough to kill off “all old beliefs,” the faiths of past generations. The aim of rebellion, however, is not merely to kill the old; it seeks to clear the ground for new ways and creeds. She waits now “beside the mill” to take up the sword of Christ or to encourage those who “dare/for her,” who will fight for the goal she would lead humanity toward. This outcome presumably would include worshipful recognition of the spiritual underlying human lives. The urge to rebellion is more declarative in several poems. “Revolt” says that the old agricultural ways have been abandoned, often forcefully. Now “my men,” apparently those who would overthrow the industrial way, are assembled, aware that the era of “madness and washing of hands has been done,” that the time for bemoaning industrialism has passed. Whatever the future they fight toward, it will include the delights of apples and cornfields, and the “whoring of men for strange gods”—here meaning a search for new ways of existence.

Always present in the poems is the urge to run west, to escape into the cornfields that not only symbolize renewal but seem themselves to offer it. In “Song of the Mating Time,” the speaker, seemingly half man and half spirit, waits in the fields for his “little sister,” the citizen of the city, to join him in flight through the “soft midwestern nights,” running west of Chicago through the corn to destinations the speaker does not specify.

The merely political, and the booklore of the past, do not provide the light Anderson's speaker is seeking. In “Song of the Soul of Chicago,” the voice is that of a workingman who finds at least a fragment of inspiration on the city's bridges, objects Anderson perhaps felt to be more aesthetic than most features of urban life. The man here, indeed, approaches Sandburgian brag in proudly comparing himself and his peers with the sewerage that is swept along by “a kind of mechanical triumph.” He declares that “we'll love each other or die trying.” His people reject the voices of bards because “we Americans from all over hell” want “to give this democracy thing … a whirl.” This poem, however, is the only indication in the book that Anderson considered political ends a reasonable goal.

As for books and the bookish, the poem “Mid-American Prayer” reminds the reader that in Anderson's day the up-to-date blamed what they inaccurately termed “Puritanism” for the nation's inadequacies. The speaker declares that the true faith came to him out of the ground, that the New Englanders who “brought books and smart sayings into our Mid-America” destroyed that faith. The speaker restored his belief only after long and lonely meditation in the corn, in which he defied “the New Englanders' gods” and sought “honest, mid-western American gods.” He prays that divinity will “lead us to the fields,” will enable Midwesterners to find their way out of confusion and feed the world by returning to the cornlands that are, he believes, their proper home.

Like his peers, Anderson did not seem to recognize that the New England influence he condemned was itself inherited from the European culture he admired. His respect for that culture was one cause of the complexity in his attitudes toward World War I. Though he later would write that he had opposed U.S. participation in the war, his biographical statements were not always accurate. The fact is that, though in Chants he sometimes spoke of the war as proof of American moral failure, he also voiced hope that the war would be a cleansing moral experience. The same notion appeared in some of his prose. In a letter to M. D. Finley, dated November 27, 1916, Anderson—positing two unattractive alternatives—even wrote that he'd rather young men would die at Verdun than undergo the “spiritual death” of residence in Chicago (Sutton, 394). And in September 1917, after the publication of Marching Men, he wrote to a newspaper inquirer that he was a “strong believer in compulsory military service” (Sutton, 397). Life in an Army company, he said, is “exactly like living in a family … A spirit of understanding of his fellow man comes to the individual soldier” (Sutton, 397). (Anderson obviously had no combat experience. He had joined the Ohio National Guard in 1895, and was called up for the Spanish-American war in 1898, but was still in training camp when the war ended. He spent the post-war months of January to April 1899 with his outfit in Cuba (A Story Teller's Story, 199).

The Foreword to Chants observes that a country comes to the maturity needed for “song” only after it has experienced the long history that the U.S. lacks. In his view, the European countries then engaged in World War I had the necessary far-reaching memory. Ideas related to these speculations appear in several poems. In “Night,” the speaker seems to reflect the struggle in Americans' minds as they sought to remain neutral yet feared that the Allies might lose. “We,” he says, are in the longest night of our lives; he ends pleading “Dear France—/ Put out your hand to us.” France, it seems, represents a nation that through its art (and perhaps also through its military struggle) exhibits qualities he thinks the U.S. should have. In “War,” the speaker asserts doubt as he sees men from Nebraska and Kansas, Ohio and Illinois, run from the factories and fields to take part in the fighting. Their participation raises questions that hurt, he observes. Perhaps he suspects that the men's behavior demonstrates the presence in Americans of a warlike spirit he does not want to acknowledge. The war also brings to life in the cornfields gods we had not known, perhaps gods associated with militarism rather than those the speaker would prefer to see.

Anderson's most extended verse appreciation of the war is in “Mid-American Prayer.” The speaker here suggests that Americans had grown “fat” in their cities, forgetting the fulfilling life of fields and prayer they once knew. He thinks of “lean men” fighting, of a time when Midwestern hands, “no longer fat,” will be qualified to touch “the lean dear hands of France,” at a time “when we also have suffered and got back to prayer.” The war is “terrible,” but it may bring to America “out here west of Pittsburgh” a redemption, a “hardness and leanness” accompanying lives “of which we may be unashamed.” Anderson thus places himself with those like Teddy Roosevelt and Marianne Moore who, though professing to deplore the costs of war, have seen it as a purifying force, one that may bring to life virtues suppressed in the materialistic everyday world.

Such fatuous theorizing is countered, however, in other poems that, though equally moralistic, reflect on the significance of combat. The speaker in “We Enter In” sees that by sending its troops into battle the U.S. has shown itself to be no better than the Europeans. It has been as material-minded as they, and consequently has failed in its mission to remake the world. “Dirge of War” reflects that the battlefield has made Americans face the failure they have hidden and, moreover, has caused them to become one with the hatred they should not have allowed themselves to feel.

Anderson did not work out a systematic position with regard to the war, and his suppositions about it ended with the Armistice. Ideas concerning the existence of some controlling force or power also were suggested but not developed. These speculations might have led him to primitivism. But though Anderson's people had been shell-shocked by the city, he was cautious about finding a spirit in nature (agriculture is an activity of human farmers, not of nature itself). Suggestions of primitivism appear in, for example, the notion of gods lying for ages in the fields until they are awakened by planters (and, in a few wartime poems, by militarism) Yet, in “Song of Industrial America,” the speaker suggests that there is an underlying “scheme” that directs even the wrenchings of life in the city.

Anderson did not say directly in Chants whether he saw a relationship between gods in the fields and the “scheme” he saw in the city. The strongest indication that a force exists in untamed nature is in “Forgotten Song.” Here the speaker declares that behind the modern human world there is a strength that is both “magnificent” and hateful, an opponent as well as a companion, one strong and challenging rather than comforting. The poem finds this now unrecognized presence to be represented by the wolf, known today only in its guise as the economic distress that lies in wait at people's doors, but once a physical adversary, one who in struggle with humankind became their lover and their enemy. People have forgotten the wolf, “God's challenge to all,” in the “bitter night” of their lives. But he still lurks far back in their minds. The speaker urges humans he loves to run with the wolf, to become again as natural, as God-following as this ancient foe, and fellow creature, who embodies realities people now fail to see.

Chants expresses hunger for that unwordly romantic beauty that is forever unattainable, its eternal distancing contributing to its fascination. Critical views of Anderson's accomplishment in verse have varied. There is near unanimity in the opinion that the Chants are negligible as art. Bernard Duffey is perhaps the most severe in his judgment that the poems are “as bad a case of maundering … as the whole Chicago Liberation, so ready in formless effusion, was to produce” (Chicago Renaissance, 203). David D. Anderson concurs in this dismissal of the poems as aesthetic creations, but finds them significant as experiments by the author in expressing his feelings, rather than the ideology he espoused in prose, and as exercises in developing his writing style (33). Walter B. Rideout suggests that the emphasis on planted fields shows a fondness for symmetry arising from what he sees as Anderson's “obsessive” need for order (169). The most favorable critic is Philip Greasley, who, in the tradition of what has been called Whig history, sees the Chants as an affirmation, the forging of “an optimistic myth for … urban-industrial man” (210).

To the finding that Anderson's verse maunders, one suitable reply is that so does much of his prose. Realist critics sometimes fail to recognize that one virtue of poetry is that it can quickly expose weakness and falsity that these critics accept in prose. My own reading finds the Chants worth attention. They provide a distinctive angle of attack on several of Anderson's themes. Among these are the importance of the American landscape, especially that of the Midwest; the insistence that divinity lies in the land and the consequent effort to develop a communion ritual; the visionary sense of alienation; the effort, only partly successful, to find release in the sexual; the occasional speculations on the possibility of revolution; the desire to see World War I as morally uplifting and the postwar suggestion that Anderson had been among the opponents of U.S. entry into that war; the sparse gestures toward primitivism; and the tentative effort—to my mind, not nearly as systematic and assured as Professor Greasley would have it—to develop an affirmative understanding of the possibilities of a fulfilling life in urban-industrial America; and the yearning of many young writers of Anderson's time for something more profound than the prosperity and quasi-democracy of America seem to offer.

These responses are not those of the wolf, of the indomitable will that he sometimes asserted, but those of a baffled, though not defeated, citizen of Chicago. One must not, however, see Anderson as merely another disappointed Romantic, a cisatlantic kissing cousin of J. Alfred Prufrock. Anderson's literary contemporaries might run from Main Street, seek an unfound door, find the principal value in modern life to be grace under pressure, or see only a forever receding green light. One may instead adopt William Faulkner's appraisal, said of his prose but applicable also to his verse, that Anderson's work represents “the vast rich strong docile sweep of the Mississippi Valley, his own America.”

Notes

1. A version of this paper was read at the Sherwood Anderson Memorial Conference at Virginia Polytechnical Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia in April 1991.

2. Association of “corn” with running and other footwork ignited a revelry of punners. Walter Rideout told me that Anderson enjoyed this verbal podiatry.

Works Cited

Anderson, David D. Sherwood Anderson: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967.

Anderson, Sherwood. “Chicago Culture.” Chicago Daily News (Chicago: February 20, 1918), p. 7.

Anderson, Sherwood. A Story Teller's Story. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve UP, 1968. Edited by Ray Lewis White.

Anderson, Sherwood. Mid-American Chants. New York: John Lane, 1918.

Duffey, Bernard. The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters. East Lansing: Michigan State College P, 1954.

Faulkner, William. “Sherwood Anderson: An Appreciation.” In Ray Lewis White, ed. The Achievement of Sherwood Anderson. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina P., 1966, p. 195.

Greasley, Phillip. “Myth and the Midwestern Landscape: Sherwood Anderson's Mid-American Chants.” Critical Essays on Sherwood Anderson, ed. David D. Anderson. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Pp. 210-16.

Rideout, Walter B. “Sherwood Anderson's Mid-American Chants.” Aspects of American Poetry: Essays Presented to Howard Mumford Jones. Richard M. Ludwig, ed. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1962. Pp. 149-70.

Sutton, William A. The Road to Winesburg: A Mosaic of the Imaginative Life of Sherwood Anderson. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972.